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Egads! I was recently given a 478 page hard-cover textbook by a major educational publisher on Scrum. You gotta be kidding me. There is so much talk and writing about Agile and Scrum and, frankly, in my opinion, 99% of it is confusing and makes things worse for the people who read it. Don’t read that stuff. Read this. Keep it simple. Here’s how Scrum works...

Want to try Rich Man’s Scrum? It's the same thing with fancier jargon.

Businesses offering cloud-based services face a growing data leakage threat, say Taiwanese hardware designers. They claim to have devised a tactic to fight back: a chip with circuitry to frustrate what are known as side-channel attacks. Side-channel attacks scrutinize things like computation time, power consumption, and electromagnetic emissions to glean something about the operations of cloud servers or to steal the cryptographic keys they use.

It makes side-channel attacks take so long that they become impractical... for now.

We are living in an unparalleled time for technological progress. In 10 years, it will be almost impossible to describe to any child in India what life was like before the internet. Only about two billion of the world's seven billion people have an internet connection, and i believe the remaining five billion will get one in the next decade. Almost one billion of them will come online in India. They will have different needs from people online today and expect different things from the internet. Now is the moment for India to decide what kind of internet it wants for them: an open internet that benefits all or a highly regulated one that inhibits innovation.

Internet in India right now is the kind that gets you arrested for saying innocuous things that someone may not like and complains to the police about.

Eg: A university professor in Calcutta sent an e-mail containing a cartoon about the state's Chief Minister. He was arrested and thrown in jail and denied bail.

Eg: When a divisive politician died in Bombay, shops shuttered their doors. One woman wrote in Facebook that the closures were more due to fear of what his followers may do to shops that were open than to any respect the shopkeeper may feel for the dead man. Another woman "liked" it. Both were arrested when a local party goon approached the police and said that if the two were not arrested, rioting would take place. Instead of arresting the goon, the police arrested the two 21-year-old girls at night and held them in jail, despite the existence of a Supreme Court order that no woman can be arrested after 7 pm (for fear of rape in police custody).

We are behind China though in pro-active censorship, if that is any consolation.

After a computer glitch sidelined NASA's Mars rover Curiosity late last month, another problem has it down again. NASA reported that Curiosity put itself into safe mode on Saturday after a software bug caused a command file to fail a size-check. "This is a very straightforward matter to deal with," said Richard Cook, Curiosity's project manager. "We can just delete that file, which we don't need any more, and we know how to keep this from occurring in the future." NASA said late on Monday that bringing Curiosity out of safe mode is expected to take a couple of days.

Newly leaked documentation accompanying the developer's kit for the successor to the Xbox 360, codenamed Durango, is rekindling rumors that the new system will require disc-based games to be installed to a hard drive before being played. The "Hardware Overview" included in the Xbox Developer Kit help files was obtained and published by VGLeaks, and it matches up closely with rumors leaked last month by SuperDaE... The document discusses how Durango games will be distributed via Blu-ray disc (an upgrade from the Xbox 360's DVDs) but says those games won't be playable directly from that optical media. Instead "all games will be installed on the hard drive... disc media will be used for distribution, but during gameplay, games will not use content from the optical disc."

Hopefully they get rid of the requirement of discs to play the game (even if you copy the game to the hard drive today, you still need to insert the dic to play the game, I think). Or maybe they could require the discs, but do so wirelessly (i.e., if the disc is resting happily in a spindle within a few hundred feet, the system can detect that and allow the game to play from the hard drive). I wouldn't want network activation unless there is a high limit on the number of systems a game can be installed on (say, 10, and it resets every year).

And while I'm at it, an SSD rather than an HDD would be nice. Hopefully for a price that isn't 5x the typical market price.

This month marks the third anniversary of Apple’s iPad. Since it hit the market, it has sold over 120 million units, and tablets in general have taken off. But large-screen tablets like the 9.7-inch iPad have remained dear for many budgets. The latest iPad and Microsoft’s new Surface RT start at $499. Even lower-priced, full-size tablets from name-brand companies typically cost $300 to $400. To pay significantly less, you’ve had to opt for a much smaller unit, in the 7-inch range. Now, major manufacturers are lowering prices for some larger-screen tablets to at least slightly below $300.

I got an Asus Transformer Pad (TF300T), and since it was refurbished I only paid $330 for it (pretty close to fitting the article's limit). It's made a great replacement for my laptop, the battery life is significantly better (I can watch Netflix during my free time between classes, only uses ~13% of the battery per hour...and that's just the tablet's battery, not counting the extra battery in the dock). And I find myself using the keyboard less and less, I still pull it out when I want to prop the tablet on a table, or when typing anything more than a couple sentences, but I don't do that often when I'm away from a desktop.

The canvas element was introduced with HTML5 and provides an API for rendering on the web. The API is simple, but if you've never done graphics work before it might take some getting used to. It has great cross-browser support at this point, and it makes the web a viable platform for games.... In this article, we're going to create a 2d game with canvas; a real game with sprites, animations, collision detection, and of course, explosions! What's a game without explosions?

Build your own Canvas-based game, or just grab the code and start exploding stuff.

A common traffic pattern we see at Shopify is the flash sale, where a product will be discounted heavily or only available for a very short period of time. Our customer's flash sales can cause traffic spikes an order of magnitude above our typical traffic rate. This blog post highlights one of the problems dealing with these traffic surges that we solved during our preparation for the holiday shopping season. In a flash sale scenario, with our app servers under high load, response time grows. As our response time increases, customers attempting to buy items will hit refresh in frustration. This was causing a snowball effect that would contribute to reduced availability.

One solution per customer. Limited to product in stock. Operators are standing by...

Breaking it down, what I've called "buildable artifacts" usually means source code, which should be housed in a version control system. A build process takes those artifacts, and produces new artifacts: artifacts which are ready to be deployed with a deployment process. These artifacts are typically binaries, usually packaged into some kind of format, and stamped with metadata explaining the contents. This idea of decoupling the build process from the deployment process is important.

Package deployment isn't a new problem. Which solutions do you think work best?

Think you put the wrong title on this one (or I didn't get the joke of using the same title twice). But it's not working on Firefox for me, takes me to Paypal still...even after I remembered to enable JS for that page. Good to know about the possibility though, I'll have to be even more careful with links now.

EDIT: Never mind, it's just my habit of middle-clicking links...it works just fine when I left-click though.

At NewsGator and Sepia Labs I worked with Brian Reischl, one of the server-side guys. Among other things, he worked on NewsGator’s RSS content service, which reads n million feeds once an hour. (I don’t know if I can say what n is. It surprised me when I heard it. The system is still running, by the way.) Brian is intimately acquainted with the different ways feeds can be screwed up. So he posted Stupid Feed Tricks on Google Docs. I quote the entire thing below for people like me who don’t have Google accounts.

Microsoft has claimed Windows 8 is off to a "solid start" with 60 million licenses sold so far and 100 million app downloads, but the company doesn't always speak app numbers and figures. The latest promotion could be a good way to generate interest in the platforms, but it's questionable whether this will generate quality applications vs. quantity. Microsoft is relying heavily on third-party developers to build next-generation apps for its Windows 8 and Windows Phone platforms, but the company still lags behind the numbers and big name apps available on iOS and Android.

Assuming the stores problem is the lack of solid apps I am failing to see the logic here. I doubt $100 is really going to entice a software firm to make a stellar product. In fact, the $100 is likely to entice numerous fluff apps that degrade further the average usefulness of applications with in the store.

Computers have been intelligent for a long time now. It just so happens that the program writers are about as effective as a room full of monkeys trying to crank out a copy of Hamlet.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.-- Sarah Hoyt